“Some Like It Hot.” Tyler Perry’s Madea. Hell, even the Disney classic “Mulan.” The ever-popular “man in a dress” gag has been a comedic staple for longer back than I care to trace. If a director or writer is scrambling to toss in a surefire laugh, a man in a dress never fails.
We’ve all fallen for it: the laughable sight of a tall, broad figure with a gruff voice and hairy knees poking out from underneath a skirt. We all love to laugh, and we’ll take any excuse we can get to get our jollies. But it’s worth examining exactly “why” we think the idea of a man wearing culturally designated female clothing is so knee-slappingly hilarious.
America’s gender binary sets up some very clear rules for what clothing is acceptable for what gender. Men can wear pants, suits, tuxedoes, boxers. Women wear skirts, blouses, dresses, high heels, pantyhose. Given the cultural recognition they receive, nonbinary people wear invisibility cloaks.
These rules are not hard and fast in all directions, as women wear pants all the time now. Sure, in the ‘20s and ’30s people threw up a stink about it, but we’re much more advanced than that now, right? We’ve moved on from such primitive, puritanical understandings of clothing.
Except that we haven’t. Not at all.
That’s why the man in the dress is still a hilarious trope.
It’s okay for women to dress “like men” because in America, there’s nothing wrong with being masculine. In fact, we tend to regard masculinity as the normal or neutral. That’s why people in pants and shirts are considered androgynous while those skirts or dresses aren’t. But there’s nothing inherently masculine or feminine about pants or skirts; they’ve just been imbued with particular cultural understandings.
The cultural understandings we’ve given to “male” clothing are positive, though. A woman in a suit isn’t funny because she, in the popular view, isn’t “degrading” herself the way a man in a dress is. A man wearing a dress is seen as forfeiting his masculinity for the clearly lesser femininity. Men in dresses are only funny because we think that a man should never stoop so low as to wear feminine clothing.
Culturally indoctrinated misogyny: it’s hilarious!
Now, I’m not demanding that every man on campus immediately run out and start buying and wearing dresses (even though personally, I think it would be good for every man to wear a dress at least once. It’s a piece of clothing, for god’s sake; it’s not going to bite you). But I am asking us to examine a comedic device that not only degrades women but also reinforces the absolutely incorrect and harmfully transmisogynistic idea that trans women are really just “men in dresses.”
Besides, if a man wants to wear a dress, so what?
To quote comedian Eddie Izzard when asked about wearing women’s clothing, “I wear dresses. They’re not women’s dresses, I buy them.”
If the clothing belongs to you, and you’re a man, then it’s a man’s dress. Women wear women’s dresses and nonbinary people wear their dresses. Of course, if you’re a man, and you’re wearing a woman’s dress, give it back to her. It’s wrong to steal, and she’s probably been looking all over for it.
Morgan Philley is a junior English major from Clinton.
